Patience Is a Virtue, Especially When Buying Games

Wait longer, pay less. This adage applies to nearly anything on your shopping list, but as I’m looking at some of the deals on Amazon.com right now, it seems to apply to videogames even more. Some of last year’s best titles—Assassin’s Creed 2, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, Forza 3 to name a few—are currently selling at a 25% discount. If you were a savvy shopper and bought everything on Techland’s Best Games of 2009 list on Amazon at their lowest price during the holidays, you would have paid almost 30% less than what you would have shelled out when these games were released (many thanks to the always-handy camelcamelcamel price-tracking site for helping me with my calculations).

The further back you go, the more you wish you had a time machine. Time’s Best Games of 2008? You could buy all of them now for just over $200, less than half of what it would’ve cost to play them on launch day.

I think it’s crazy that 15 months after its debut, Dead Space could be yours right now for $19. Is the game only 68 percent as good as it was in October ’08? Of course not. It’s just as terrific now as it was then. I’m not advocating waiting a year to buy your games. For the very best games, the wait would be torture. Also, something tells me the publishers wouldn’t approve. But wouldn’t it be great if you could pull a Rip Van Winkle, wake up a year from now, and buy God of War III for chump change?